This is what happened:
It was eighth grade science class, middle school. Miss Malone was our teacher. She was a serious looking woman and chemistry was her life. You paid attention in her class, took pages of notes, most likely to be ignored until test time, and you absolutely didn’t dare let her catch you talking in class unless you were answering a question. So we passed notes. It was 1971 and there were no Blackberries or cell phones. The notes weren’t anything threatening or important; it was just a way to have a silent conversation with a friend; prehistoric text messaging of a sort.
Kim sat next to me and she and I became good friends via this clandestine activity. Together we escaped the droning lectures of the periodic elements and complex formulas that all things seemed to be made of. Strangely enough, we both passed eighth grade Chemistry, advancing us from middle school seniors to SCS freshman. Kim was the kind of girl a guy would be lucky to have as a friend. The kind of a girl-friend relationship that dating would have ruined. It was just a simple, comfortable, porch-sitting friendship that didn’t have to go further and everyone I explain this to seem to understand what I mean.
Kim and I stayed friends, which isn’t too hard in a small community like Skaneateles. We saw high school through before committing to college, some 6 miles away at Cayuga County Community College or C-to-the-fourth as it was known then (we were so clever).
I worked with Kim during our college semesters and summers at P&C Foods, socializing when time permitted. Kim started out in accounting in college and switched to English. I started out in chemistry and after a series of horrible marking periods switched to electronics. Kim graduated and moved on as friends often do and after 4 short years at a 2 year school, so did I: all the way to Liverpool NY.
I spent the next 20 or so years in the red tape paper trail of Navy Sonars working for GE. I don’t know where Kim went.
But I found out later. While I was busy making the submarine detection equipment, Kim became a bestselling author. A book she wrote even became a movie. How cool is that.
Recently, Kim came home to Skaneateles for a lecture, so I called her up.
She came down to my house on Genesee Street and we sat on the porch for over hour and cranked up the time machine everybody has in their head.
“I haven’t read one of your books,” I said.
“I’ve never seen one of your Sonars,” she came back.
I asked why she came back. I love it here, she replied. It’ll always be home.
She asked why, after 20 plus years of electronics and only a sketchy freelance writing background, why did I become the new editor of the Skaneateles Press.
Same answer, I said.
